A crowd had gathered at the stage door, for no particular reason … just to be as near as possible to a couple of murders and, better yet, to be near a murderer. I pushed my way through them and went immediately to Jane’s dressing room. She had been asleep when I got home from Sutton’s apartment the night before and she had been asleep when I left in the morning, at nine o’clock, to help Mr. Washburn with the reporters who had, for three hours, made our lives miserable at the office.
She was mending one of her costumes; the day was cruelly hot and she wore no clothes.
I gave her a long healthy kiss, tilting her chair back so far that she kicked the air gracefully with her long legs, to keep her balance.
“Is it true?” she asked, when we were done and I was again composed.
I nodded. “Has Gleason seen you yet?”
“I don’t see him till four something. He killed himself, didn’t he?”
“I suppose so.”
“But … like that! Did you see him?”
I shuddered, remembering. “I’ll say. It was the awfullest sight … worse than the war … at least then you were usually looking at people you didn’t know, and there were so many of them …”
“But the papers act as if he’d been murdered.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“But how could he kill himself in that way?”
“He might’ve passed out … you know he was taking an awful lot of the stuff, whatever it was he took … you remember my telling you how I found him passed out in the hall the day after Ella died.”
“Let’s hope this is the end of the whole mess.”
“I hope so, too.” But I knew that we hadn’t come to the end of the trouble … I’d taken to calling it “the trouble” in my mind, like one of those Negro spirituals.
“How’re the kids in the company holding up?”
“Scared to death,” Jane smiled. “They’re positive we’ve got a maniac around … they go everywhere in pairs, even to the john.”
“And the thing I always liked about dancers was that they had no imagination.”
“Sometimes I think you’re against ballet.”
“I am … I am,” I said, locking the door. “But I’m not against you …” And I headed for her with an insane leer, scaring hell out of her. Then, before she had time to complain, I was out of my clothes and we were together on the floor, doing it like Mamma and Poppa as Eglanova would say … she likes the old-fashioned, heart-to-heart method, with no thrashing about … so do I, on hot days at least, when anything else would use up too much energy. After we finished, we lay side by side for a bit on the cool dirty floor.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” said Jane, at last.
“Why not? We missed last night. At least I did.”
“I did, too.”
“Are you sure you didn’t have a frolic with that Senator?”
“With who?”
“That big middle-aged job with the gray hair you were talking to at the party … the red face.”
“Oh him! Was he a Senator?”
“I should say so.”
“He told me he was a broker named Haskell.”
“I hope you got your money in advance.”
“Don’t be dirty.”
A knock on the door brought us both to our feet in a flash. “Wait a second,” called Jane in the cool voice of one used to keeping her head in crises. Since I had not taken off my shoes and socks, I was able to dress with a speed which did credit to my military training. Jane slipped into a bathrobe and opened the door while I sat down before the dressing-table mirror and dried my sweaty face with a handkerchief as Magda entered.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know …”
“Come on in,” said Jane briskly, offering her the third and last chair. “How do you feel?”
“Awful … naturally.”
“I thought you were too sick to come to the theater?”
“I am,” said Magda, and she did look ill. “I wanted to come, though. To talk to you, to my friends here. You have no idea what it’s been like this last week with my family around and everything, not being able to see Miles …” Her voice broke a little. “The family wouldn’t let me see him but he came once, anyway, when they were out and we talked and made plans and then I went to see him last night.”
“Have you seen Gleason yet today?” I asked quickly, before she could start weeping. “Yes.”
“What does he say—what about the autopsy?”
“He wouldn’t tell me but I told him that someone had killed Miles … I don’t know how but someone did.”
“But why? If somebody else murdered Ella then they certainly wouldn’t murder Miles just as he was about to be arrested for Ella’s murder.”
“Oh, but they would,” said Magda. “You see, Miles knew who killed Ella.” I must say this gave us both a jolt.
“How do you know he did?”
“Because he told me so the last time I saw him. He told me not to worry … that if they tried to charge him with murder he would tell everything.”
“But he didn’t tell you who it was?”
Was it my imagination or did she pause just a second before she answered? Before she said: “No, he didn’t tell me.”
“Did you tell Gleason all this?”
“Oh yes … I told him a lot more, too.”
“The sooner it’s finished the better,” said Jane emphatically, taking out her sewing kit and going to work on the torn costume.
We talked a little more and then, seeing that the girls had a lot to discuss, I wandered on stage where Alyosha was giving some directions to the electricians. He looked very dapper in a Lord Byron shirt, magenta slacks, with a silk handkerchief tied about his lean neck and his monocle screwed in one eye.
“We must have everything right for tomorrow,” he said to me as the electrician walked away. “Anna will do Swan Lake.”
“And for once, it won’t be her ‘last’ performance,” I said.
Alyosha smiled. “No, she won’t be able to weep this year. Ten more years I give her. She is at her peak.”
Well, you better get her some contact lenses, I said to myself, trying to imagine the old star at sixty reeling about the stage in Giselle.
“Have you seen Wilbur today?”
I said that I hadn’t.
“I was told he was to start rehearsing the new ballet today … if he is he should send out a call for the dancers he wants. They are all eager, naturally.”
“I think he intends to use most of the company, but not until the season closes.”
“If you see him, though, tell him to let me know which dancers he will want … he is not used to our system.”
I said that I would and we parted.
My interview with Gleason was more amiable than usual.
He looked very hot in a white crumpled suit which made me think of a photograph I once saw of William Jennings Bryan when he was down in Tennessee fighting evolution.
Where were you at such and such a time and did you for any reason leave the party before such and such an hour? No sir I did not sir. We got through the preliminaries without a blow. Then the first of the brass tacks.
“Where, Mr. Sargeant, did you find those shears?”
“I found them, now that I think of it, in Eglanova’s dressing room … someone had put them in the wastebasket. I took them out.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“I wasn’t sure it had any bearing on the case.”
“Aren’t we to be the judges of that?”
“Certainly … I didn’t remember at the time. So many things had happened.” I’m no fool … I’ve watched some of those investigations over television: all you have to do is say you can’t remember, or that you’ve suddenly remembered, and you’re legally safe.